


The Clock Broke

by Manyobsessions



Category: Falsettos - Lapine/Finn
Genre: Cheating, Implied Sexual Content, Infidelity, M/M, Wait a minute... This isn't tennis! This is anal sex!, bare with, i haven't written properly since 2015, pre-falsettos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-28
Updated: 2017-07-28
Packaged: 2018-12-08 01:32:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11636163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Manyobsessions/pseuds/Manyobsessions
Summary: Whizzer meets the family.





	The Clock Broke

He was lying with me in a tangle of my bedsheets, his smile soft and blue in the dim light coming from the city outside the window. It would fade within minutes; Marvin's smiles were fleeting and restless and I could never catch them quickly enough to hold onto them. He could never settle on an emotion and so they would all fight against one another, neither winning over the rest for very long, smiles giving way to vacancy, eyes yellow with anger dissolving into their usual brown. Happiness, boredom, guilt, all faded into one another and ebbed away in time, and Marvin would leave me again, hollow, and go back to his family.

But for now, he was here, smiling at me, and I couldn't hear the cars outside, and the clock was blinking, stuck at midnight, so maybe I could pretend that no time was passing at all, and that we were entirely alone, and that he could stay.

"Whizzer," he breathed my name, his fingers tracing my collarbone, his eyes sliding shut.

"Yeah, Marv?" I twisted his hair between two of my fingers.

"Nothing," he kissed my shoulder and rolled onto his back, staring up at the ceiling, and my hand fell back onto the pillow.

I traced the cracks in the ceiling with my eyes, the warmth already fading from the sheets around me. I couldn't keep hold of him, his warmth, and I didn't want to, really. His wife had been trying for nine years, she'd said, since 1969. They'd been married for nine years. I wondered whether I should be feeling guilty.

Trina had invited me into their home earlier that evening when I showed up to fetch Marvin, smiling a little too brightly, telling me dinner was almost ready and asking whether I worked with her husband.

"Oh, yeah." I'd said, "Advertising. Love it." I was a freelance photographer.

She'd asked me why I was picking up Marvin and I'd told her we played racquetball together every Tuesday and Thursday. We didn't.

Out of some morbid curiosity, over dinner I had asked her how she and Marvin had met, and she had told me that they were the only two Jewish kids in their economics class in college, and had been together since their third year. They'd got married as soon as they got out. Her smile never left her face but her voice was strained, and when she stretched her hand across the table, Marvin didn't take it. Jason, the kid, sat opposite me, swinging his legs through the silent air.

"Why did you marry her?" I now asked, not taking my eyes off the ceiling.

Marvin turned his head to face me. "Jason's nine years old, if that gives you any clues."

"Ah," I looked at him, and he was smiling like he found it funny, so I smiled back. "Romantic."

And he laughed. Briefly, but deep in his throat, and his eyes glinted in the dim, technicolor light. His hair was falling haphazardly over his forehead, and he looked so bare. The air was warm and quiet, still and heavy.

"She's probably waiting for me at home." And his emotions were slipping out of my grasp again. His smile closed, his eyes hardened, and warmth gave way to gritty reality.

"She probably is."

She had told me over dinner that she was always waiting. Every Tuesday and Thursday, she waited for Marvin to come home from what she now thought was racquetball, every Wednesday she waited for him to come home from therapy, she didn't know where he was on Fridays, but she waited for him regardless. She said all of this with a bright smile on her face, proud of her own devotion to her husband, happy to be revolving around him, catering to his ego. She was the perfect wife.

"I have to be honest, Whizzer," she had said, "I half-expected Marvin to be spending all of this time with some gorgeous blonde!" She laughed lightly, smile still unsettlingly wide. "It turns out I'm just crazy." She drained her wine glass.

Marvin had stood up calmly, fists shaking, and I had leaned back in my seat, cradling my own glass, watching closely to see the flashes in his eyes. He kicked his chair to the ground, it landed with a wooden crash, I sipped my wine, Trina watched blankly, Jason swung his legs. Marvin yelled something about how Trina was right, she was crazy, and how dare she accuse him of that in front of their son; there was a lot of accusatory finger-pointing going on, and he torpedoed out of the room, pushing a row of books off a shelf as he left. A picture frame shattered.

We heard the front door slam behind him, and the dishes rattled on the table. Jason hadn't stopped swinging his legs. Trina just put her head in her hands. The room was entirely silent, apart from the syncopated ticks of the clock on the wall.

"Excuse me," I said, and left.

Marvin was standing by my car, and the picket fence next to it had a fresh dent.

"Marvin? What was that?"

"Why did you come inside, Whizzer? We agreed that you'd never come inside!" His anger was tangible, heat radiating from his body, hitting me in intoxicating waves. His eyes were yellow and venomous and I hadn't seen a genuine emotion on his face in days. It was infectious.

"Oh, so it's my fault? Your wife invited me in!" I scoffed, crossing my arms.

"Don't talk about my wife. Just, don't-"

"Don't talk about your wife? You want me to ignore her? Just pretend she doesn't exist?" I stepped towards him, crowding him against the car door. "What about your son?" His eyes flashed and he shoved me away by my shoulders.

"Leave them out of this, Whizzer, Jesus!" He pushed me again and I stumbled over a paving stone. "Yes, I married a woman, and I've paid for it every day since. How much longer am I going to have to pay? And you're supposed to be on my side!"

I laughed derisively, "I'm not supposed to be anything, Marvin, I'm not your housewife."

"I'm not saying you are! But you could be a bit less of a bitch about my infidelity considering that you play a pretty active role in it!" He was so self-centred. He could never take the blame, the consequences, he was always pointing fingers. And he was always hungry for a fight.

"Oh, so Whizzer's the bad guy, huh? Okay." I turned back to the house and raised my voice, "Trina! I'm so sorry! It's all my fault! I'm so sorry that your husband is a secret queer and he's screwing-"

Marvin threw me up against the car, one hand clamped over my mouth and the other gripping my hip, forcing bruises into it. His eyes were alight with that fierce anger and his touch was vicious. He was out for blood.

"Be quiet." He said, and I closed my eyes, easing into his familiar, brutal touch. He moved the hand covering my mouth to the back of my neck, tugging on my hair. Somehow it always ended like this.

"You know, if we leave now, we probably still have time for a couple of rounds of racquetball," I suggested, and he let go.

"You're unbelievable." He said, but he almost smiled and he got into the car anyway.

And later, when I buried my face in his bare shoulder, and whispered incoherently about his wife and how I was better than her, quietly enough that he wouldn't hear, he touched my hip again, reverently, and I though he might have been listening.

And now he was rolling out of my bed, disentangling himself from my sheets, distancing himself again.

The clock was still stuck at midnight. I stared back up at the ceiling, the cracks spreading like spiderwebs across the popcorned plaster, as Marvin pulled his shirt back on. The blown lightbulb hanging above me glinted with the reflections of streetlights from beyond the window, where the world kept moving. Marvin was mechanically fixing his tie, sitting on the edge of the bed, silhouetted in the orange glow of the streets outside, staring blankly at the clock.

"Stay," I found myself murmuring, and the muscles in Marvin's shoulders tightened, so I sat up and stroked the tension from them, kissing his hair, his neck. He relaxed into me and I looped my arms around his waist, rested my head on his shoulder blade, and held him as close to me as I could. His body fell forwards, crumbling into itself, as he let the stiff pretension go.

"Whizzer, I can't." Marvin's voice was small, and cracked, stumbling over each syllable. "I can't."

"I know," I whispered. He could never stay. His wife, son, and dented picket fence awaited him in his reality.

He buried his face in his hands, elbows pressing into his knees. "I've made so many mistakes, Whizzer."

"I know."

"I'm sorry for blaming you."

"Okay." I slid a hand back into his hair. "Come back to bed."

And Marvin smiled his blue smile, and wrapped himself around me, re-situating himself in my bedsheets, listening to my heartbeat as his hair brushed against my chin.

And the clock was still frozen, and Marvin stayed until dawn.

**Author's Note:**

> I submitted this shit as coursework can you believe,
> 
> join me at @fun-is on tumblr


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